Lists of Nobel Prizes and Laureates

Lists of Nobel Prizes and Laureates

The Nobel Peace Prize, 1901-2000

Introduction

This article is intended to serve as a
basic survey of the history of the Nobel Peace Prize during its
first 100 years. Since all the 107 Laureates selected from 1901
to 2000 are to be mentioned, the emphasis will be on facts and
names. At the same time, however, I shall try to deal with two
central questions about the Nobel Peace Prize. First, why does
the Peace Prize have the prestige it actually has? Second, what
explains the nature of the historical record the Norwegian Nobel
Committee has established over these 100 years?

There are more than 300 peace prizes in the
world. None is in any way as well known and as highly respected
as the Nobel Peace Prize. The Oxford Dictionary of Twentieth
Century World History, to cite just one example, states that
the Nobel Peace Prize is "The world's most prestigious prize
awarded for the 'preservation of peace'." Personally, I think
there are many reasons for this prestige: the long history of the
Peace Prize; the fact that it belongs to a family of prizes, i.e.
the Nobel family, where all the family members benefit from the
relationship; the growing political independence of the Norwegian
Nobel Committee; the monetary value of the prize, particularly in
the early and in the most recent years of its history. In this
context, however, I am going to concentrate on the historical
record of the Nobel Peace Prize. In my opinion, the prize would
never have enjoyed the kind of position it has today had it not
been for the decent, even highly respectable, record the
Norwegian Nobel Committee has established in its selections over
these 100 years. One important element of this record has been
the committee's broad definition of peace, enough to take in
virtually any relevant field of peace work.

On the second point, the selections of the
Norwegian Nobel Committee reflected the insights primarily of the
committee members and secondarily of its secretaries and
advisors.

But, on a deeper level, they also generally reflected Norwegian
definitions of the broader, Western values of an idealist, the
often slightly left-of-center kind, but rarely so far left that
the choices were not acceptable to Western
liberal-internationalist opinion in general. The Norwegian
government did not determine the choices of the Norwegian Nobel
Committee, but these choices reflected the same mixture of
idealism and realism that characterized Norwegian, and
Scandinavian, foreign policy in general. As we shall see, some of
the most controversial choices occurred when the Norwegian Nobel
Committee suddenly awarded prizes to rather hard-line realist
politicians.

Nobel's Will and the Peace Prize

When Alfred Nobel died on December 10,
1896, it was discovered that he had left a will, dated November
27, 1895, according to which most of his vast wealth was to be
used for five prizes, including one for peace. The prize for
peace was to be awarded to the person who "shall have done the
most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the
abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding of
peace congresses." The prize was to be awarded "by a committee of
five persons to be elected by the Norwegian Storting."

Nobel left no explanation as to why the
prize for peace was to be awarded by a Norwegian committee while
the other four prizes were to be handled by Swedish committees.
On this point, therefore, we are dealing only with educated
inferences. These are some of the most likely ones: Nobel, who
lived most of his life abroad and who wrote his will at the
Swedish-Norwegian Club in Paris, may have been influenced by the
fact that, until 1905, Norway was in union with Sweden. Since the
scientific prizes were to be awarded by the most competent, i.e.
Swedish, committees at least the remaining prize for peace ought
to be awarded by a Norwegian committee. Nobel may have been aware
of the strong interest of the Norwegian Storting (Parliament) in
the peaceful solution of international disputes in the 1890s. He
might have in fact, considered Norway a more peace-oriented and
more democratic country than Sweden. Finally, Nobel may have been
influenced by his admiration for Norwegian fiction, particularly
by the author Bjørnstjerne
Bjørnson, who was a well-known peace activist in the
1890s. Or it may have been a combination of all these
factors.

While there was a great deal of controversy
surrounding Nobel's will in Sweden and that of the role of the
designated prize-awarding institutions, certainly including the
fact that the rebellious Norwegians were to award the Peace
Prize, the Norwegian Storting quickly accepted its role as
awarder of the Nobel Peace Prize. On April 26, 1897, a month
after it had received formal notification from the executors of
the will, the Storting voted to accept the responsibility, more
than a year before the designated Swedish bodies took similar
action. It was to take three years of various legal actions
before the first Nobel Prizes could actually be
awarded.

1901-1913: The Peace Prize to the Organized
Peace Movement

Although there was nothing in the statutes
that prevented the Storting from naming international members,
the members of the Nobel Committee of the Storting (as the
committee was called until 1977) have all been Norwegians from
the very beginning. They were selected by the Storting to reflect
the strengths of the various parties, but the members elected
their own chairman. From December 1901 and until his death in
1922, Jørgen Løvland was the chairman of the Nobel
Committee. He was one of the leaders of the Venstre (Left) party
and served briefly as Foreign Minister (1905-1907), and then as
Prime Minister (1907-1908). A majority of the five committee
members in this period consistently represented that party.

Initially, Venstre represented a broad
democratic-nationalist coalition, emphasizing universal suffrage,
first for men, later for women, and independence from Sweden. The
party strongly wanted to isolate Norway from Great Power
politics; not only did it want Norway's full independence, but
also some form of guaranteed permanent neutrality, based on the
Swiss model. Yet at the same time, the party had a definite
interest in international peace work in the form of mediation,
arbitration and the peaceful solution of disputes. Small
countries, certainly including Norway, were to show the world the
way from Great Power politics to a world based on law and
norms.

Norwegian parliamentarians, particularly
from Venstre, took a strong interest in the Inter-Parliamentary
Union formed in 1889. After Switzerland, Norway was the first
country to pledge an annual contribution, first for its general
operations (1895), and then for its office in Bern (1897). Norway
was to have hosted the Union's conference in 1893, but because of
the tense situation vis-à-vis Sweden the conference in Oslo
was held only in 1899. These same liberal politicians were also
highly sympathetic to the peace groups and societies that sprang
up in many countries in the last decades of the 1800s, groups
which starting in 1889 were internationally organized in the more
or less annual Universal Peace Congress. The Permanent
International Peace Bureau, founded in 1891 in Bern, became the
international headquarters of this popular movement. (The
movement long struggled with difficult finances, despite small
fixed annual grants from Switzerland, Denmark, Sweden and
Norway.) A third element in the peace work of this period was the
more official movement, culminating in the Hague Conferences of
1899 and 1907, called by Tsar Nicholas II of Russia, to the
enormous surprise of the governments of most other major powers.
(The tsar was never seriously considered for the Peace
Prize.)

Those few members of the Nobel Committee
who did not represent Venstre tended to be jurists who took a
special interest in building peace through international law, a
desire shared by Venstre. Thus, former conservative Prime
Minister and law professor Francis Hagerup was a committee member
from 1907 to 1920. He was also chairman of the Norwegian
delegation to the second Hague Conference in 1907.

With this composition of the Nobel
Committee in mind, the list of the Nobel Laureates for the years
1901 to 1914 comes as no big surprise. Of the 19 prizes awarded
during this period, only two went to persons who did not
represent the Inter-Parliamentary Union, popular peace groups or
the international legal tradition. The first two elements may
also be said to have reflected the point in Nobel's will about
the prize being awarded for "the holding and promotion of peace
congresses."

The first prize in 1901 was awarded to
Frédéric
Passy (and Jean
Henry Dunant). Passy was an obvious choice for the first
prize since he had been one of the main founders of the
Inter-Parliamentary Union and also the main organizer of the
first Universal Peace Congress. He was himself the leader of the
French peace movement. In his own person, he thus brought
together the two branches of the international organized peace
movement, the parliamentary one and the broader peace
societies.

In 1902, the Peace Prize was awarded to
Élie
Ducommun, veteran peace advocate and the first honorary
secretary of the International Peace Bureau, and to Charles Albert Gobat,
first Secretary General of the Inter-Parliamentary Union and who
later became Secretary General of the International Peace Bureau.
(In 1906-1908 Gobat coordinated both groups, further underlining
the close relationship between them.) In 1903 the prize went to
William
Randal Cremer, the "first father" of the Inter-Parliamentary
Union. In 1889, Bertha
von Suttner had published her anti-war novel Lay Down Your
Arms. After that, she was drawn into the international peace
movement. She undoubtedly exercised considerable influence on
Alfred Nobel, whom she had known since 1876, when he later
decided to include the Peace Prize as one of the five prizes
mentioned in his will. In 1905, she was awarded the Peace Prize,
the first woman to receive such a distinction. Her supporters
strongly felt that the prize had come too late, since she had had
such an influence on Nobel. In 1907, the prize was awarded to Ernesto
Teodoro Moneta, a key leader of the Italian peace movement.
In 1908, the prize was divided between Fredrik
Bajer, the foremost peace advocate in Scandinavia, combining
work in the Inter-Parliamentary Union with being the first president
of the International Peace Bureau, and Klas
Pontus Arnoldson, founder of the Swedish Peace and Arbitration
League. In 1910, the Permanent
International Peace Bureau itself received the prize. In
1911, Alfred
Hermann Fried, founder of the German Peace Society, leading
peace publisher/educator and a close collaborator, shared it
with Tobias
Michael Carel Asser. In 1913, Henri
La Fontaine was the first socialist to receive the Nobel
Peace Prize. He was head of the International Peace Bureau from
1907 until his death in 1943. He was also active in the Inter-Parliamentary
Union.

International legal work for peace represented
the third road to the Nobel Peace Prize. In 1904, the Institute
of International Law, the first organization or institution
to receive the Peace Prize, was honored for its efforts as an
unofficial body to formulate the general principles of the science
of international law. In 1907, Louis
Renault, leading French international jurist and a member
of the Permanent Court of Arbitration at The Hague, shared the
Peace Prize with Ernesto
Teodoro Moneta. In 1909, the prize was shared between Paul
Henri Benjamin Balluet, Baron d’Estournelles de Constant
de Rebecque, who combined diplomatic work for Franco-German
and Franco-British understanding with a distinguished career in
international arbitration, and Auguste
Marie François Beernaert, former Belgian Prime Minister,
representative to the two Hague conferences, and a leading figure
in the Inter-Parliamentary Union. Like d'Estournelles and Renault,
Beernaert was also a member of the Permanent Court of Arbitration.
Thus, few if any of the Laureates summed up the different stands
of the early peace movement in the way Beernaert did. The Laureate
of 1911, Tobias Michael Carel Asser, was also a member of the
Court of Arbitration as well as the initiator of the Conferences
on International Private Law. When America's Elihu
Root received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1912, he had served
both as U.S. Secretary of War and Secretary of State. But he was
awarded the prize primarily for his strong interest in international
arbitration and for his plan for a world court, which was finally
established in 1920.

Jean Henry Dunant (1901) and Theodore
Roosevelt (1906) are the two Laureates who clearly fall
outside any of the categories mentioned so far. Dunant, who
founded the International
Red Cross in 1863, had been more or less forgotten until
a campaign secured him several international prizes, including
the first Nobel Peace Prize. The Norwegian Nobel Committee thus
established a broad definition of peace, arguing that even humanitarian
work embodied "the fraternity between nations" that Nobel had
referred to in his will. Roosevelt was the twenty-sixth president
of the United States and the first in a long series of statesmen
to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. He received the prize for
his successful mediation to end the Russo-Japanese war and for
his interest in arbitration, having provided the Hague arbitration
court with its very first case. Internationally, however, he
was best known for a rather bellicose posture, which certainly
included the use of force. It is known that both the secretary
and the relevant adviser of the Nobel Committee at that time
were highly critical of an award to Roosevelt. It is thus tempting
to speculate that the American president was honored at least
in part because Norway, as a new state on the international
arena, "needed a large, friendly neighbor - even if he is far
away," as one Norwegian newspaper put it. Even if, or perhaps
rather because, the prize to Roosevelt was controversial, it
did in some ways constitute a breakthrough in international
media interest in the Nobel Peace Prize.

1914-1918: The First World War and the
Red Cross

The First World War signified the collapse
of the peaceful world which so many of the peace activists honored
by the Nobel Peace Prize had worked so hard to establish. During
the war, the number of nominations for the prize diminished somewhat,
although a substantial number was still put forward. During the
difficult war years, the Nobel Committee in neutral Norway decided
to award no prize, except the one in 1917 to the International
Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC). The ICRC had been established
in 1863 as a Swiss committee; the preceding year, the Convention
for the Amelioration of the Conditions of the Wounded in Armies
in the Field (the Geneva Convention) had been signed. During the
First World War, the ICRC undertook the tremendous task of trying
to protect the rights of the many prisoners of war on all sides,
including their right to establish contacts with their families.

1919-1939: The League of Nations and
the Work for Peace

In the 1920s, Venstre's domination of the
Nobel Committee continued even after the death of Jørgen
Løvland and despite the choice of Conservative law professor
Fredrik Stang (1922-1941) as the new chairman of the committee
and the inclusion of Labor party historian Halvdan Koht in 1919.
Old-timers Hans Jakob Horst and Bernhard Hanssen served on the
committee from 1901 to 1931 and from 1913 to 1939, respectively.
They were joined by Johan Ludwig Mowinckel (1925-1936) who meanwhile
served as both Norway's Prime Minister and Foreign Minister during
three separate periods. In the 1930s, the membership of the committee
became more mixed, but the Venstre members now maintained the
balance between more conservative and social democratic members.
Still, during the period from 1919 to 1939, the growing political
tension within the committee and the presence of certain stubborn
individuals, resulted in as many as nine "irregular" years, when
either no prize was awarded or it was awarded one year late, compared
to only one such year in the period from 1901 to 1913.

After the First World War, Norway became a
member of the League of Nations. This break with the past was
smaller than it might seem. In the Storting, 20 members, largely
Social Democrats, voted against membership. Even most of the 100
who voted in favor came to insist on the right to withdraw from
the sanctions regime of the League in case of war. Norway basically
still perceived itself as a neutral state. The old ideals of mediation,
arbitration, and the establishment of international legal norms
definitely survived, only slightly tempered by the experiences
of the war and the membership in the League. Yet at the same time,
some states and some statesmen were definitely regarded as better
than others. Most Norwegian foreign policy leaders felt closest
to Great Britain and the United States, despite significant fishery
disputes with the former and the geographical distance and isolationism
of the latter.

At least eight of the 21 Laureates in the
period from 1919 to 1939 had a clear connection with the League
of Nations. For the Nobel Committee the League came to represent
the enhancement of the Inter-Parliamentary Union tradition from
before 1914. In 1919, the Peace Prize was awarded to the President
of the United States, Thomas
Woodrow Wilson for his crucial role in establishing the League.
Wilson had been nominated by many, including Venstre Prime Minister
Gunnar Knudsen. In a certain sense the prize to Wilson was obvious;
what still made it controversial, also among committee members,
was that the League was part of the Versailles Treaty, which was
regarded as diverging from the president's own ideal of "peace
without victory." The prize in 1920 to Léon
Victor Auguste Bourgeois, a prominent French politician and
peace activist, showed the continuity between the pre-1914 peace
movement and the League. Bourgeois had participated in both the
Hague Conferences of 1899 and 1907; in 1918-1919 he pushed for
what became the League to such an extent that he was frequently
called its "spiritual father."

Swedish Social Democratic leader Karl
Hjalmar Branting had also done long service for peace, but
was particularly honored in 1921 with the Peace Prize for his
work in the League of Nations. His fellow Laureate, Norway's Christian
Lous Lange, the first secretary of the Norwegian Nobel Committee,
had been the secretary-general of the Inter-Parliamentary Union
since 1909 and had done important work in keeping the Union
alive even during the war. After the war he was active in the
League until his death in 1938. In 1922, the Norwegian Nobel
Committee honored another Norwegian, Fridtjof
Nansen, for his humanitarian work in Russia, which was done
outside the League, but even more importantly for his work on
behalf of the League to repatriate a great number of prisoners
of war. From 1921, he was the League's High Commissioner for
Refugees. The refugee problem proved rather intractable. The Nansen
International Office for Refugees was authorized by the
League in 1930 and was closed only in 1938. For its work, it
received that year's Nobel Peace Prize.

In 1934, British Labour leader Arthur
Henderson received the Peace Prize for his work for the
League, particularly its efforts in disarmament. No single individual
was more closely identified with the League from its beginning
to its end than Viscount
Cecil of Chelwood who was honored with the prize in 1937.
Only Koht's threat of resignation from the committee prevented
the Peace Prize from being awarded directly to the League of
Nations. In 1924, the committee even discussed awarding the
prize to the Inter-Parliamentary Union.

In the years 1919-1939, the Nobel Committee
also continued to honor the less official workers for peace. Since
the peace societies of the pre-1914 period had lost most of their
importance, this category of Laureates was now considerably more
mixed than it had been in the earlier period. The clearest connection
to the past was found in the shared prize for 1927 to Ludwig
Quidde and Ferdinand
Buisson. Buisson had joined his first peace society as early
as 1867 and he had also been active in the Inter-Parliamentary
Union, while the younger Quidde had joined the German Peace Society
in 1892. In 1927, they were honored for their contributions to
Franco-German popular reconciliation. In 1930, Lars
Olof Nathan Söderblom was the first church leader to
be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts to involve the
churches not only in work for ecumenical unity, but also for world
peace. In 1931, Jane
Addams was honored for her social reform work, but even more
for establishing in 1919, and then leading the Women's International
League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF). Sharing the prize with Jane
Addams was Nicholas
Murray Butler, president of the Carnegie Endowment for International
Peace, promoter of the Briand-Kellogg pact and leader of the more
establishment-oriented part of the American peace movement. Sir
Norman Angell, who received the Peace Prize for 1933, had
written his famous book The Great Illusion as early as
1910. In the book he argued that war did not pay, not that it
was impossible as it was frequently understood to have stated.
In the inter-war years, he was a strong supporter of the League
of Nations as well as an influential publicist/educator for peace
in general.

The most clear-cut representative in this
period of the legal tradition to limit or even end war was the
former American Secretary of State, Frank
Billings Kellogg. He was awarded the 1929 Peace Prize for
the Kellogg-Briand pact, whose signatories agreed to settle all
conflicts by peaceful means and renounced war as an instrument
of national policy.

While Theodore Roosevelt and, to a lesser
extent, Elihu Root, were the only prominent international politicians
to receive the Nobel Peace Prize in the years before 1914, at
least five prominent politicians in addition to Kellogg were to
be so honored between 1919 and 1939. In 1926 alone, the Nobel
Committee actually awarded the reserved prize for 1925 to Vice
President Charles
Gates Dawes of the United States and Foreign Secretary Sir
Austen Chamberlain of Great Britain and the 1926 prize to
Foreign Minister Aristide
Briand of France and Foreign Minister Gustav
Stresemann of Germany. Dawes was responsible for the Dawes
Plan for German reparations which was seen as having provided
the economic underpinning of the Locarno Pact of 1925, under which
Germany accepted its western borders as final. The four prizes
reflected recognition of the changed international political climate,
particularly between Germany and France, which Locarno helped
bring about. It was probably also an effort by the committee to
strengthen Norway's relations with the four international powers
that mattered most for its interests. In 1936, the prize was awarded
to Argentine Foreign Minister Carlos
Saavedra Lamas for his mediation of an end to the Chaco War
between Paraguay and Bolivia. Lamas also played a significant
role in the League of Nations.

The most controversial award of the inter-war
period was undoubtedly the one for 1935 to Carl
von Ossietzky, the anti-militarist German journalist held
by the Nazis in a concentration camp who had become an important
international symbol for the struggle against Germany's rearmament.
The prospect of a prize to Ossietzky led to the withdrawal from
the committee of both Koht, at that time Norway's Foreign Minister,
and Mowinckel, who served several times as Prime Minister. This
was done to establish a separation between Norway as a state and
the Norwegian Nobel Committee. At least Koht was also skeptical
of the choice of Ossietzky as a Laureate. This was the first such
withdrawal in the committee's history. The Storting then decided
that no government minister could serve on the committee while
in office. Hitler's reaction to the award was strong. He issued
an order under which no German could receive any of the Nobel
Prizes. (This affected two Chemistry Laureates, Richard
Kuhn in 1938 and Adolf
Friedrich Johann Butenandt in 1939 and Medicine Laureate Gerhard
Domagk in 1939.) Ossietzky was not permitted to go to Oslo
to receive the prize; he was transferred to a private sanatorium,
but died 17 months later. The prize to Ossietzky illustrated how
controversy could be combined with prestige for the prize, although
this became much clearer over time than it was in 1936.

1940-1945: The Second World War and Another
Prize to the Red Cross

On April 9, 1940, Germany attacked Norway
and two months later the entire country was occupied. The Norwegian
government fled to London. Committee meetings were actually held
during the first years of the war, but from 1943 with the committee
members scattered, no further meetings were held. The early meetings
focused on non-prize business. By underlining the Swedish nature
of the Nobel Foundation, the Nobel Committee in Oslo escaped a
German takeover of its Institute building.

No Peace Prize had been awarded for 1939 since
the war had broken out well before the prize was normally announced.
Later, during the war virtually no nominations came in. When the
committee was able to meet again after the war, it decided to
give the Peace Prize for 1944 to the International
Committee of the Red Cross, the same Laureate as in 1917,
with much the same reasoning. In the darkest hour the ICRC had "held
aloft the fundamental conceptions of the solidarity of the human
race." In so doing it had promoted the "fraternity between nations" which
Nobel had referred to in his will.

1945-1966: The Cold War and the United
Nations

In 1945, Norway joined the United Nations
with considerable enthusiasm. There was little of the division
and hesitancy that had characterized Norway's policy toward the
League of Nations. The German attack on Norway had destroyed most
of the earlier confidence in neutrality; so when the Cold War
began and Norway felt it had to make a choice between East and
West it definitely chose the West, first in the form of the Marshall
Plan and then NATO. Norway became quite a loyal member of NATO,
but remnants of the more traditional attitudes could be found
in the policy of no foreign troops and no atomic weapons on Norwegian
soil, in its negative attitude toward European and even Nordic
integration and in a lingering skepticism toward Great Power politics
and arms build-ups. The idealist component in Norwegian foreign
policy now moved away from arbitration and mediation and more
toward arms control and disarmament, aid to poor countries, and,
increasingly, questions of human rights, certainly including those
in Allied countries.

From 1945 to 1965 the Labor party dominated
Norwegian politics. From 1949 to 1965 it also held a majority
on the Nobel Committee, but the three Labor members rarely behaved
as a group, since two were strongly Western-oriented (Martin Tranmæl
and Aase Lionæs) and one was more neutral (Gustav Natvig
Pedersen). The chairman of the committee from 1942, in effect
from 1945 to 1966, Gunnar Jahn, was a stubborn Venstre politician;
the Conservative leader C.J. Hambro was equally stubborn and had
strong links back to the inter-war years. From 1949 to 1964 membership
on the committee remained entirely unchanged. Again, tension within
the committee was one strong factor behind the large number of
years with no prize or postponed prizes (eight) during this period.

Of the 20 prizes awarded in this period, nine
were in some way or other related to the United Nations, thus
reflecting both the strong Norwegian support for the organization
as such and the continuation of the long committee line going
back to the Inter-Parliamentary Union and the League of Nations.
Long-time U.S. Secretary of State Cordell
Hull was given the 1945 award primarily for his, and America's,
strong leadership in the creation of the UN. In 1949 Lord
John Boyd Orr of Brechin was honored as the founding director-general
of the UN Food and Agricultural Organization, the first scientist
to win the Peace Prize, not for his scientific discoveries as
such, but for the way in which they were employed to "promote
cooperation between nations." In 1950 the prize went to Ralph
Bunche, the principal secretary of the UN Palestine Commission,
for his mediation of the 1949 armistice between the warring parties.
Bunche was also the first black person to receive the Nobel Peace
Prize. More loosely connected to the UN, in 1951 veteran French
and international labor leader Léon
Jouhaux was the recipient of the Peace Prize. He had helped
found the International Labor Organization in 1919 and had been
active in the League of Nations. After the war he was a French
delegate to the UN General Assembly. In 1954 the Office
of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, established
in 1951, was honored, thereby underlining the long-standing interest
of the Norwegian Nobel Committee in the question of refugees.

The Peace Prize in 1957 to Canada's Lester
Bowles Pearson was given primarily for his role in trying to end
the Suez conflict and to solve the Middle East question through
the United Nations. As Foreign Minister of Canada he had become
one of the leading UN statesmen of his period. In 1961, the prize
was awarded to the second Secretary General of the UN, Dag
Hammarskjöld, for strengthening the organization. Hammarskjöld
is the only person to have received the prize posthumously, a
few months after his death in a plane crash in the Congo; the
Nobel statutes were later changed to make a posthumous prize virtually
impossible. (In 1965 and 1966 a majority of the committee clearly
favored giving the prize to the third Secretary General, U Thant,
and even to the first, Norway's Trygve Lie, but chairman Jahn
more or less vetoed this.) The United
Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), established by the
UN General Assembly in 1946, was awarded the Peace Prize in 1965.

Most of the politicians who were given prizes
related to the UN combined their UN work with a clear Western
orientation in the Cold War. This went for Hull, Bunche, Jouhaux,
and Pearson and, to a lesser extent, also Hammarskjöld. In
this period no Communist politician was ever seriously considered
for the prize. (Soviet diplomat and feminist Alexandra Kollontay
was discussed in 1946-1947, but quickly rejected.) A whole series
of Indians - Gandhi and
Nehru, but also other politicians, philosophers and scholars -
were considered, but all were found wanting in one way or another.
Still the committee was reluctant to give the prize to politicians
who were seen as too exclusively Western in their orientation.
The only exception was George
Catlett Marshall, Peace Laureate of 1953. Marshall's name
was of course closely linked with the famous Marshall Plan, but
the Cold War nature of his work was played down by the committee
in favor of his role during the Second World War and his humanitarian
work in general.

During this period too, the Norwegian Nobel
Committee continued to honor individuals and organizations that
had worked to strengthen the ethical underpinnings of peace. At
least four of the awards fall under this category: the 1946 joint
awards to Emily
Greene Balch, co-founder and long-time leader of the Women's
International League for Peace and Freedom and the acknowledged
dean of the American peace movement, and to John
Raleigh Mott, long-time executive of the Young Men's Christian
Association (YMCA) and world ecumenical leader working for peace
on the basis of the Bible. Thus, Balch followed closely in the
footsteps of Jane Addams and Mott somewhat less closely than in
those of Nathan Söderblom. In 1947 the prize went to two
arms of the Quaker movement, the Friends
Service Council in Britain and the American
Friends Service Committee, for their work for social justice
and peace, certainly including their relief work during and after
the Second World War.

The humanitarian category of Peace Prize Laureates
was well established through the prizes to Dunant, the two to
the ICRC, to Nansen and to the Nansen Office. In this period it
could be argued that at least in part, the prizes to Mott and
to the Quakers and certainly the prize to the UN High Commissioner
for Refugees fell in this category. Another clear-cut example
was the prize for 1952 to Albert
Schweitzer, the well-known medical missionary in Gabon who
had started his work there as early as 1913. Schweitzer's ethical
philosophy rested on the concept of "reverence for life." In the
same category was the prize in 1958 to Georges
Pire, Dominican priest and theologian, honored for his work
on behalf of European refugees and even more for the spirit that
animated his work. On the 100th anniversary of the founding of
the Red Cross, the 1963 prize was divided between the Swiss
International Committee of the Red Cross and the international League
of Red Cross Societies, representing the two major arms of
the Red Cross movement.

Neither was the disarmament category a new
one. Possibly the prizes to Suttner and Arnoldson (who had favored
an appeal stating, among other things, that "I want all armed
forces to be abolished") and certainly to Henderson and Ossietzky
could be seen as falling in this category. The continuity with
the past was most clearly seen in the award in 1959 to Philip
J. Noel-Baker. Noel-Baker had helped found both the League
of Nations and the United Nations. His special interest was still
disarmament and he had participated in the League's Conference
on Disarmament in 1932. With the introduction of nuclear weapons,
his work for disarmament became even more insistent. The biggest
surprise in this category was the prize for 1962, awarded in 1963,
to Linus
Carl Pauling. Pauling had won the Nobel
Chemistry Prize in 1954, but he then became increasingly preoccupied
with the hazards of the nuclear arms race. He worked hard to bring
about a test-ban treaty and the respect accorded him was strengthened
by the signing of the partial test-ban treaty of 1963. Still,
in many American circles Pauling was considered to harbor pro-Communist
sympathies. The Western-oriented majority of the Norwegian Nobel
Committee was actually against giving him the prize. What secured
him the prize was chairman Jahn's threat to resign from the committee
unless Pauling got it. Jahn, too, had become increasingly preoccupied
with the danger of nuclear weapons.

One important category of Peace Prize Laureates
was fully established in this period - those who worked for human
rights. Some of the earlier Laureates had touched upon elements
of human rights, although they had been primarily honored for
other contributions. This went for Buisson, founder of the French
League of the Rights of Man, Ossietzky, honored also for his right
to speak out on the armament question, and Jouhaux, champion of
economic and social rights. The first definite human rights prize
was probably still the one for 1960 to Albert
John Lutuli. The Zulu chief had been elected president-general
of the African National Congress in 1952 and held this position
until his death in 1967. He was thus in the very forefront of
the struggle against apartheid in South Africa, a struggle which
was receiving added international attention after the Sharpville
massacre of March 1960. In a period when the ANC was about to
change its tactics, Lutuli stood explicitly for non-violence.
The Peace Prize to Lutuli is also often seen as signaling a change
in the selection of Laureates in a more global direction. (More
about this shortly.) In 1964 American civil rights leader Martin
Luther King Jr. received the Peace Prize for his non-violent
struggle against segregation, the American version of apartheid.

1967-1989: The Cold War and the Globalization
of the Prize

In the mid-1960s the membership of the Norwegian
Nobel Committee changed. The Labor party lost its majority in
1965, and Jahn retired at the end of 1966. Labor held the chairmanship
under Nils Langhelle (1967), Aase Lionæs (1968-1978), the
first woman leader, and John Sanness (1979-1981). Lionæs
had become a member of the committee as early as 1949; she was
in fact the only woman on the committee until 1979. She was also
the only one of the pre-1965 members continuing on the committee.
Lionæs had tried to secure the Peace Prize for Eleanor Roosevelt,
but failed; in general she did not particularly push female candidates.
The non-Socialist majority held the chairmanship under conservative
Bernt Ingvaldsen (1967) and Egil Aarvik (1983-1990) of the Christian
People's Party, but it too rarely acted in unison. So, as in the
earlier period, personal views were more important than party
loyalties. In this period there were only three irregular prizes.

After 1965 political power fluctuated between
Labor and non-socialist governments, but differences between the
major parties were small on most foreign policy questions, with
the primary exception of the very divisive issue of Norwegian
membership in the European Community. In the Middle East, traditionally
strong sympathies for Israel were increasingly balanced by a growing
understanding of the Palestinian/Arab cause. Support for the UN
remained very strong; the same was the case with backing for NATO,
although the Vietnam war was to accelerate a more critical attitude
to the United States, particularly among youth and the increasingly
important women groups. Impatience with the limited results achieved
in arms control and disarmament, particularly on the nuclear side,
was growing. On the Norwegian Nobel Committee this impatience
was reflected in Chairman Aarvik's personal views. Norway's interest
in human rights in most corners of the world was clearly also
rising.

In this period four prizes were awarded to
UN-related activities. In 1968, during the UN International Rights
Year, and exactly twenty years after the approval by the UN General
Assembly of the Declaration of Human Rights, René Cassin received
the Peace Prize. Cassin was generally considered the father of
the declaration, but had also served as vice-president and then
as president of the European Court of Human Rights. (He had also
been a French delegate to the League of Nations.) In 1969 the International
Labour Organization (ILO) was honored. ILO was established
in 1919 and it was the only organization associated with the League
of Nations to outlive it; as a specialized agency of the UN, its
work rested on the principle that peace had to be based on social
justice. In 1981, on its thirtieth anniversary, the Office
of the High Commissioner for Refugees received its second
Peace Prize. Norway as a country had long made the largest per
capita contribution of any country to this UN office. In 1988
the United
Nations Peacekeeping Forces were honored. There was a strong
feeling that as the Cold War was coming to an end, the UN ought
to become more important and that this would be reflected in a
new role for peacekeeping. In addition, the 1982 Peace Prize to
Sweden's Alva
Myrdal and Mexico's Alfonso
García Robles could be considered at least in part
a UN prize, since much of their disarmament work had been done
in various UN negotiations.

Again no Communist politician was awarded
the Peace Prize. Instead the human rights prizes to the Soviet
dissident, and one-time creator of the Soviet hydrogen bomb, Andrei
Dmitrievich Sakharov in 1975, to Polish labor leader Lech
Walesa in 1983, and to the 14th Dalai Lama in Tibet, Tenzin
Gyatso, in 1989, the year of the Tiananmen Square massacre,
were severely criticized by the Communist leadership in the three
countries involved. Again the neutralist movement as such went
unrecognized. On the Western side, German Chancellor Willy
Brandt received the prize in 1971 for his Ostpolitik,
an effort to bring East and West Germany, as well as Eastern and
Western Europe, closer together. Brandt had spent the years from
1933 to 1945 in exile in Norway and Sweden, had excellent connections
with Norwegian politicians and spoke perfect Norwegian. In 1974
former Japanese Prime Minister Eisaku
Sato received the Peace Prize for his renunciation of the
nuclear option for Japan and his efforts to further regional reconciliation.
Sato was the first Asian to accept the Peace Prize, to the surprise
of many in that part of the world, including even in Japan, who
saw him as a rather conventional politician.

In 1973 the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded
to US National Security Adviser and Secretary of State Henry
A. Kissinger and North Vietnamese leader and negotiator Le
Duc Tho for the 1973 Paris agreement intended to bring about
a cease-fire in the Vietnam war and a withdrawal of the American
forces. This award is definitely the most controversial one in
the history of the Nobel Peace Prize. Le Duc Tho declined the
Peace Prize, the only person to have done so, since there was
still no peace agreement. Kissinger did not come to Oslo to receive
the prize in person and soon indicated he wanted to return it,
but was told the statutes did not permit this; two of the committee
members resigned after it had become known that there had been
disagreement and that they had in fact been against the award.
(They supported Brazilian archbishop Helder Camara, who received
a Norwegian people's prize instead.) Public reaction to the prize,
both in Norway and internationally, was largely negative.

The 1973 controversy may have influenced the
Storting to establish a new precedent under which the legislators
themselves could no longer be members of the newly re-named Norwegian
Nobel Committee. The members now tended to be either ex-politicians
or persons not so explicitly connected with party politics. The
most important reason behind the change, however, was a general
desire to distinguish more clearly between the Storting itself
and the non-parliamentary committees it appointed.

Regional crises represented nothing new in
the Cold War. The Nobel Committee had previously awarded prizes
to those who had worked to solve such crises, whether this be
the crucial Franco-German conflict or the war between Paraguay
and Bolivia. With the Cold War and the end of Western colonial
rule over large parts of the world, such crises took on added
prominence, also for the Nobel Committee. The situation in the
Middle East was particularly difficult. In 1950 Ralph Bunche and
in 1957 Lester Pearson had received the Peace Prize for their
efforts there. In 1978, Egyptian President Mohamed
Anwar al-Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem
Begin were honored for the Camp David Agreement, which brought
about a negotiated peace between Egypt and Israel. This agreement
too, proved controversial. Only Begin came to Oslo to receive
the award. A technicality prevented the American president, Jimmy
Carter, from being the third Laureate; the committee actually
wanted to include him, but he had not been nominated when the
deadline expired on February 1 of that year.

In Western Europe the situation in Northern
Ireland represented the bloodiest ethnic-national conflict. The
Peace Prize for 1976 was awarded to Betty
Williams and Mairead
Corrigan for their efforts to end that conflict through a
popular mobilization against violence. In Norway the Nobel Committee
was strongly criticized for being late in recognizing the two
women; they had in fact been given a Norwegian people's peace
prize before the Nobel one. In 1987 Oscar
Arias Sánchez, Costa Rica's president, was honored
for his leadership in having the five presidents of Central America
sign a peace agreement for the area. Both of these awards could
be seen as the intervention of the Norwegian Nobel Committee in
conflicts where progress toward peace had definitely been made,
but conflicts had been far from resolved. The committee clearly
hoped that the prize itself would provide an added impetus for
peace. This effect was very limited in Northern Ireland, but more
significant in Central America, although it still took years before
all the many conflicts there were more or less resolved.

On the issue of arms control and disarmament,
referred to as "the reduction of standing armies" in Nobel's will,
the Nobel Committee, by general Western standards, again proved
relatively radical. This was seen in the 1982 Peace Prize to Alva
Myrdal and Alfonso García Robles, but even more clearly
in the 1985 prize to International
Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW). The
committee had been so impressed by the cooperation between Soviet
and American physicians within the IPPNW that it explicitly invited
founders Evgeny Chazov and Bernard Lown to receive the award on
behalf of the organization. Conservatives in West Germany, Britain,
and the United States particularly criticized the committee's
decision. (So did former committee chair Lionæs.)

In this, as in other periods, some humanitarians
were also honored. Somewhat in the tradition of Boyd Orr, Norman
Borlaug, an American of Norwegian descent, was selected in
1970 for his contributions to the "green revolution" that was
having such an impact on food production particularly in Asia
and in Latin America. In 1979 Mother
Teresa received the prize. She came from a family of Catholic
Albanians, but lived most of her life in Calcutta, working for
the poorest of the poor through her order, the Missionaries of
Charity.

Among the more general peace advocates in
this period, several have already been mentioned: Betty Williams
and Mairead Corrigan, Alva Myrdal and the Dalai Lama. The best
example was perhaps still the 1986 Laureate, Elie
Wiesel. Wiesel was a Jewish survivor of the Holocaust and
had become the leading interpreter of the relevance of this event
for contemporary generations.

Human rights represented the fastest growing
field of interest for the Norwegian Nobel Committee. The awards
to the ILO and the Dalai Lama and, even more, to René Cassin,
Andrei Sakharov and Lech Walesa have already been mentioned. In
1974, Seán
MacBride shared the prize with Eisaku Sato. MacBride had a
multi-faceted background, but was honored primarily for his strong
interest in human rights: piloting the European Convention on
Human Rights through the Council of Europe, helping found and
then lead Amnesty
International and serving as secretary-general of the International
Commission of Jurists. In 1977 the prize was awarded to Amnesty
International itself. Founded in 1961, it was an increasingly
important organization aimed particularly at protecting the human
rights of prisoners of conscience. In 1980 the Argentinian human
rights activist Adolfo
Peréz Esquivel was honored. Esquivel had founded non-violent
human rights organizations to fight the military junta that was
ruling his country. His message was also seen as relevant for
much of the rest of Latin America. The apartheid regime in South
Africa continued to preoccupy the Nobel Committee and the Norwegian
public. In 1984 Bishop Desmond
Mpilo Tutu was recognized for his non-violent struggle to
bring apartheid to an end. The South African government strongly
disliked the award, as it had Lutuli's, but again it let the Laureate
travel to Oslo to receive it.

It was only in this period that the Nobel
Peace Prize became truly global in its approach. The first Peace
Prize to a person not from Europe and North America had been the
one to Lamas in 1936. The next one was Lutuli's in 1960. Yet,
even Lutuli's prize did not really signal an unmistakable trend,
since only from the 1970s onwards did the Nobel Committee regularly
award Asians (Le Duc Tho, Eisaku Sato, the Dalai Lama, in a sense
also Mother Teresa), Africans (Anwar Sadat, Desmond Tutu) and
Latin Americans (Adolfo Pérez Esquivel, Alfonso García
Robles, Oscar Arias Sánchez). Thus, in the 1970s and 1980s
there were as many Laureates from Africa, Asia, and Latin America
combined as from North America and Western Europe combined. (In
addition there were Andrei Sakharov and Lech Walesa from Eastern
Europe and Menachem Begin from Israel.)

One may ask why it took the Norwegian Nobel
Committee so long to recognize persons from these other continents.
The answer has several elements. For centuries Europe and North
America dominated the rest of the world. There were few other
independent actors. Reflecting this, very few nominations for
the Nobel Peace Prize were submitted by persons from Asia, Africa
and Latin America. In addition, most Western politicians simply
did not pay much attention to what was going on in these vast
regions; some even considered those who lived there inferior.
Such feelings certainly affected Norwegians too, probably also
some of the members of the Nobel Committee.

Mohandas Gandhi was, however, nominated five
times and he was put on the committee's short list three times.
In 1948 the committee awarded no prize; it indicated that it had
found "no suitable living candidate", a reference to Gandhi. It
thus seems likely that he would have been awarded the prize if
he had not been assassinated in January 1948. Still, the committee
had had earlier opportunities to honor the man who, in hindsight,
is generally seen as the leading spokesman of non-violence in
the 20th century. Under the statutes then in force, Gandhi could
have been awarded even the 1948 prize, as seen by the posthumous
prize awarded to Hammarskjöld in 1961. Yet, a posthumous
prize was an obvious complication. Gandhi had his supporters on
the committee, but the majority felt that despite his own non-violence,
violence had sometimes resulted from his actions, even before
the bloody division between India and Pakistan; he was also perceived
as too much of an Indian nationalist. Such feelings might have
been affected by Norway's traditionally very close relationship
to Britain, by a rapidly growing skepticism to neutrality in the
Cold War and even by a more general underestimation of individuals
from "underdeveloped" parts of the world.

The reaction to apartheid in South Africa
after the Sharpeville massacre was to modify such underestimation,
but, as we have seen, this happened rather slowly. The decolonization
process in Asia and Africa certainly also had an impact. All forms
of racial stereotyping were banned from civilized public discourse.
The growing emphasis on human rights furthered the globalization
of the prize, as did the emphasis on finding a solution to regional
crises in different parts of the world.

1990 - : Pluralist Globalization

Around 1990 huge changes were taking place
internationally. The Cold War came to an end, with the collapse
of the Soviet empire in 1989 and of the Soviet Union itself in
1991. Expectations were high for the new post-Cold War world,
but it soon became obvious that an end to the Cold War did not
signal the end of war and conflict. The arms race slowed down
considerably, but it still continued in various parts of the world.
Old conflicts lingered; many new ones arose. Human rights advanced
greatly, with the emergence of new democracies in Central and
Eastern Europe, in Latin America and Asia, and even in Africa,
but almost half the world's population still lived under some
form of dictatorship. The composition of the Norwegian Nobel Committee
underwent few dramatic changes in the 1990s. The committee majority
again moved left of center in terms of Norwegian politics, with
the Labor party having two representatives and the Socialist Left
one. After Aarvik's death in 1990, Labor's Gidske Anderson served
as chair of the committee for only half a year, until illness
forced her to step down. The committee chairman from 1991 to 1999,
Francis Sejersted, was a Conservative professor of history. In
2000 former Labor cabinet minister Gunnar Berge became the new
chairman. From 1979 the committee regularly had two women members;
from 2000 it even had a female majority. In the 1990s the prize
was awarded on a regular basis every year.

The Norwegian Nobel Committee celebrated the
end of the Cold War with the 1990 Peace Prize to Mikhail
Sergeyevich Gorbachev, President of the Soviet Union, the
person who, in the Committee's opinion, had done more than any
one else to bring the Cold War to an end. Encouraged by the end
of the Cold War, the committee was also prepared to intervene
even more frequently than before in regional conflicts around
the world in the hope that the Nobel Peace Prize could not only
award deeds done, but also provide an added incentive for peace.
The prize in 1993 to Nelson
Mandela and Frederik
Willem de Klerk could be regarded as a success in that respect,
although it came at a stage when most of the transition from apartheid
to democracy had already been accomplished.

In 1994, the Peace Prize was awarded to Palestinian
leader Yasser Arafat, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak
Rabin and Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon
Peres for the Oslo Agreement, which brought about a mutual
recognition and a framework for peace between the Palestine Liberation
Organization (PLO) and Israel. The three politicians had accomplished
much, but they were still far from establishing a final peace
between Israelis and Palestinians. The award resulted in one member
leaving the committee, the leading spokesman in Norway for the
Likud party in Israel. This was the third resignation in the history
of the Norwegian Nobel Committee. In 1996, the prize was awarded
to East Timorese leaders Bishop Carlos
Filipe Ximenes Belo and José Ramos-Horta. The
tragic situation in East Timor after the Indonesian invasion in
1975 had been almost forgotten internationally. Due to the effect
of the Nobel Peace Prize and, even more, of the Indonesian economic
and political collapse in 1997-1998, East Timor was able to start
on the road toward independence. In 1998 the committee honored
Northern Irish leaders John
Hume and David
Trimble. Through the Good Friday Agreement of that year, the
major parties to that protracted conflict agreed on the principles
for its resolution, although it might take years before the agreement
is fully implemented. In 2000 the Peace Prize was awarded to South
Korean President Kim
Dae-jung, both for his "sunshine policy" of contacts and cooperation
with North Korea and his long-standing commitment to human rights
in South Korea and elsewhere.

The Norwegian Nobel Committee also further
strengthened its somewhat radical profile within the field of
arms control and disarmament. Two such prizes were awarded in
the 1990s. The first one came in 1995, on the 50th anniversary
of the atomic bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, to Joseph
Rotblat and the Pugwash
Conferences on Science and World Affairs. Rotblat had initially
worked on the Manhattan Project, which created the bombs, but
had left the project to take up a life-long struggle against nuclear
weapons. He had helped create the Pugwash Conferences where since
1957, scientists from the United States, the Soviet Union and
many other countries had met in an effort to reduce the role of
nuclear weapons in international relations. The second prize came
in 1997 when the International
Campaign to Ban Landmines (ICBL) and its coordinator, Jody
Williams, were honored for their work to ban and remove anti-personnel
land mines and to support the victims of such mines.

In the 1990s the human rights tradition was
extended by prizes to two women. In 1991 the Peace Prize was awarded
to Aung
San Suu Kyi, the leader of the opposition against the Burmese
military regime. Her party won an overwhelming victory in the
1990 election, but she was then confined to house arrest. While
her cause now came to receive broad international support, the
military regime continued in power. Somewhat more controversial
was the 1992 award, on the 500th anniversary of Columbus's discovery
of America, to Rigoberta
Menchú Tum, the Maya Indian campaigner for human, particularly
indigenous, rights in Guatemala and the rest of Latin America.
The humanitarian tradition was continued through the 1999 award
to Médecins
Sans Frontières (MSF) - or Doctors Without Borders
- for its "pioneering humanitarian efforts on several continents." The
work of MSF clearly had a human rights dimension in addition to
the humanitarian one. As already mentioned, the 2000 award to
Kim Dae Jung also combined two traditional elements in the history
of the Peace Prize.

The Nobel Peace Prize through 100 Years:
Some Conclusions

Thus, some lines of development can be distinguished
in the almost 100 year history of the Nobel Peace Prize. First,
although the Norwegian Nobel Committee never formally defined "peace," in
practice it came to interpret the term ever more broadly. This
approach could have its pitfalls, but avoided the danger of locking
the committee into fixed categories and gave the committee flexibility
to adapt to new concerns. In the early years, the emphasis was
definitely on the organized peace movement and the codification
of international law, but even in the very first year of the Peace
Prize the first humanitarian, and five years later, the first
statesman were selected. Later the balance shifted away from the
organized peace movement and international jurists, although some
of them continued to be selected and the category came to include
church leaders and even a Holocaust interpreter. Humanitarians
became more numerous, and this category came to include scientists
who worked to alleviate hunger. Disarmers became more numerous
too, and this category came to include those who supported limited
arms control and not necessarily full disarmament. Different kinds
of statesmen were awarded the Peace Prize, some for addressing
global concerns, others for helping to solve regional crises,
still others for the general principles they espoused. The human
rights category was added to the list and gradually became perhaps
the most numerous one.

Second, from a slow start, the list of Laureates
became increasingly global, so that by the 1970s all continents
except Australia and Oceania were represented. In the nominations
and correspondence to the committee, it is easy to see how a prize
to one continent stimulated interest in the prize in this area.
Third, although Bertha von Suttner was awarded the Peace Prize
in 1905, particularly in the early decades few women were selected.
In recent decades, this too has changed, although not as dramatically
as the geographical distribution of the Laureates, so that by
2000 ten women have received the Nobel Peace Prize. Fourth, the
Norwegian Nobel Committee has increasingly come to use the Peace
Prize not only as a reward for achievements accomplished, but
also as an incentive for the Laureates to achieve even more. This
may be said to reflect the growing courage of the committee members
or, perhaps more accurately, the increasing stature of the Nobel
Peace Prize.

No prize will be able to establish a "perfect" historical
record, whatever that might be. Most observers will agree that
the omission of Gandhi from the list of Nobel Laureates is a serious
one, but it might be the only one of such a nature. There may
well have been some Laureates that perhaps should not have received
the prize, but still did. But there is not much of a consensus
on which ones these Laureates are. Controversy is certainly no
good judge in this respect. (These days, when even Mother Teresa
is considered controversial by some, it may also be difficult
to know what is controversial.) In historical hindsight, several
of the more controversial prizes are now considered among the
most successful ones (Ossietzky, Lutuli, Sakharov, the Dalai Lama,
Gorbachev). On the other hand, the prize to Kissinger and Le Duc
Tho shows that controversy is no guarantee of historical success.
On the whole, however, after taking into consideration what a
treacherous field "peace" is and also the record of the many other
peace prizes, it can certainly be argued that the standing of
the Nobel Peace Prize would not have been what it is if it had
not been for its highly respectable record.

This essay has attempted to place the history
of the prize within a Norwegian context. This is natural since
the committee members through these 100 years have all been Norwegians.
Until 1936 they sometimes included even prominent members of the
Norwegian government; until the 1970s they were frequently members
of the Storting. Later they were often ex-politicians, many of
them having served in prominent positions. Some of the politicians
honored, from Roosevelt to Arafat, Peres and Rabin, may well have
served Norwegian state interests in the sense that their selection
fitted well into government policy. On the more speculative side,
the non-award to Gandhi may also have been influenced by Norway's
close relationship to Britain, and after the Second World War
any award to the leading figures behind the movement toward European
economic and political integration was clearly difficult in a
country as divided on that issue as was Norway. (Brandt was only
a partial exception.) On the other hand, some of the committee's
selections were clearly problematic from the point of view of
the Norwegian government. The best illustrations of this were
probably the awards to Ossietzky and the Dalai Lama.

In principle almost everyone would prefer
a Nobel Committee with an international membership. In practice,
however, an international committee would have faced serious problems.
(What would such a committee have done during the Cold War?) The
connections to Norwegian values, as well as to Norwegian politics,
may be regarded as questionable for the prestige of the Peace
Prize, but it may in fact have had its advantages. Thus, after
the Second World War hardly any term has been and still is more
popular in Norwegian foreign policy parlance than "bridge-building." While
an increasingly rich Northern state firmly attached to the West
and with strong sympathies for Israel, Norway has been concerned
with building bridges to the East, to the South, and increasingly
to the Palestinians and other Arabs. It is a separate question
how realistic such attitudes are as a basis for a country's foreign
policy, but as a basis for prize selections, a blend of idealism
and realism may not be so bad.

The values that underpinned the Nobel Peace
Prize were concretely defined by Norwegians, but they were part
of a wider Scandinavian and Western context. They represented
the Norwegian version of Western liberal internationalism. Thus,
the Norwegian Nobel Committee has been a strong believer in international
organizations, from the Inter-Parliamentary Union to the League
of Nations and the United Nations. Organizations and rules had
been employed to contain conflicts within Norway; they could also
temper international strife. Small nations almost instinctively
prefer international law to the might they do not possess, and
they believe in the arbitration, mediation and peaceful solution
of international disputes. In a similar way, the Nobel Committee
believed in humanitarian assistance to the weak and the poor,
in arms control and disarmament, and, more and more fervently,
in human rights generally.

When we look at the nationalities of the Laureates,
we also get an idea of where liberal internationalism has been
most strongly represented (or has been perceived by the Norwegian
Nobel Committee as being most strongly represented). Virtually
all of the organizations honored had clear roots in this Western
ideology. Although liberal internationalism was in many ways ideally
suited for smaller powers, it also had many supporters in the
Great Powers. On the individual side, nineteen of the Laureates
have come from the United States, representing both leading politicians
- two presidents, one vice-president, five secretaries of state
- and those more distant from and skeptical to the centers of
power (Addams, Balch, Pauling, King, Williams); twelve have come
from Great Britain, again reflecting both traditions, Austen Chamberlain
and Joseph Rotblat perhaps representing the extremes; eight have
been French, four have been German. Five have been Swedish (Arnoldson,
Branting, Söderblom, Hammarskjöld and Myrdal). Two have
been Norwegian (Lange, Nansen).

Thus, perhaps, in compiling its record through
these 100 years, the Norwegian Nobel Committee has actually been
able to be both very Norwegian and quite international at the
same time.

Geir Lundestad has been Director of
the Norwegian Nobel Institute in Oslo and Secretary of the
Norwegian Nobel Committee since 1990. He was born in Sulitjelma,
a mining community in Northern Norway, in 1945. He received his
MA (Cand. philol.) in history from the University of Oslo in 1970,
PhD from the University of Tromsø in 1976.

Lundestad held positions at the University of Tromsø from
1974: Associate Professor of History, Professor of American
Civilization 1979-88, Professor of History 1988-90. He has also
been a research fellow at Harvard University (1978-79, 1983) and
at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, D.C. (1988-89). While
being the Director of the Nobel Institute, Lundestad is also
Adjunct Professor of International History at the University of
Oslo.

His main publications are: The American Non-Policy Towards
Eastern Europe 1943-1947 (1975), America, Scandinavia and the
Cold War 1945-1949 (1980), East, West, North, South. Major
Developments in International Politics since 1945. (First
Norwegian Edition in 1985, later revised, Fourth Edition 1999),
'Empire' by integration: the United States and European
integration 1945-1997 (1998).